I recently came across an article[1] on Search Engine Land written by Jill Whalen entitled “Is Most of SEO just a Boondoggle?” which deserves some discussion.

“Boondoggle” is defined at Wordnet[2] as “work of little or no value done merely to look busy.” Now Jill does go on to say “This is not to say that all SEO is a waste of time”

This is a very interesting article in my opinion. Although I will admit that I do not agree with Jill for most of it, with the exception of the meta keywords tag stance. But this does bring up a good point that maybe some “Old School” SEO practices do not carry as much weight as they once did. We include a lot of these as our best practices now, H1’s, clean keyword-rich URL structures, XML sitemaps, etc…… , but what does it say when a recognized figure in our industry (Jill Whalen) is saying lots of this doesn’t apply anymore and calling it boondoggle! Is she testing these statements and proving them not to be effective anymore or is this just opinion? I don’t know the answer to this. No-one will ever know Google’s algorithm in its entirety, but we can test and prove certain aspects to be absolute, thereby dispelling any myths or opinions. Another point I would like to bring up is a phrase I once heard from a highly recognized figure in this space that said, the best thing to do when optimizing a site is to be the “least imperfect” in every area. I’m not 100% sure that is the case anymore. For my own testing on my wife’s e-commerce site, which I did all the SEO for, I applied that principle, but I’m noticing something lately that has me thinking….

When creating my URL’s, I used clean keyword-rich URL’s and the anchor text that I pass to the pages is an exact match. Yet, 75% of my competitors — the top 10 results on Google SERP’s — seem to be intentionally creating URL’s that make no sense, some dynamically generated, and do not match the anchor text perfectly and they seem to be getting rewarded for it?? Of course my testing has compared domain age, link profile and on-page content and I seem to be lined up in all those areas, but they are seeing a boost that I am not. Does this possibly speak to over-optimization of a website or page being devalued by Google? If that’s the case, then why does Google have Webmaster Guidelines for us to follow if it makes no difference in the end.